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The Industrial Revolution is regarded by many historians as one of the most pivotal periods in human history. This era, which blossomed in England before spreading across Europe and Asia and to the Americas, fundamentally changed the nature of economics, culture, philosophy, and society across the globe. "The industrial revolution constituted one of those rare occasions in world history when the human species altered its framework of existence," remarks Peter N. Stearns in The Industrial Revolution in World History. "Because of the power of the industrial revolution, virtually everything was altered: relationships between parents and children, art, politics, and diplomatic relations, to name some areas of change. By the 1850s the industrial revolution was beginning to encompass the whole of history, particularly in societies that were directly industrializing but also to some extent around the world."
England's Transformation from Agrarian to Industrial Society
The Industrial Revolution that was formed in England in the eighteenth century was actually preceded by an agricultural revolution that laid the groundwork for the era of industrialization that would follow. English farming in the 1700s was characterized by a growing division of previously communal lands into individual farms. This enclosure movement, as it was called, led to an increased consolidation of farmland into the hands of wealthy landowners who squeezed out their economically vulnerable neighbors. However, it also gave those farmers who survived greater freedom to explore alternative methods of farming, since they no longer needed the approval of other members of the community. Agricultural advances developed such as crop rotation and Jethro Tull's invention of a mechanical drill for planting and the horse-drawn hoe. These innovations, coupled with improvements in farming machinery and the growing consolidation of farmland, sparked a tremendous surge in agricultural production in England. Many farmhands and small landowners, however, found that they could no longer survive as they had in the past; the new agricultural environment made it necessary for them to look to England's growing cities for employment. As Stearns reports, "the early industrial revolution depended on the need that growing numbers of workers had for jobs in order simply to survive. Necessity, not attraction, lay at the root of the formation of Britain's new factory labor force."
In those cities, the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution were taking place. Great Britain possessed all the components necessary for the creation of an industrial society. The country had abundant mineral resources and was blessed with a trade-enhancing network of harbors and river systems. It also wielded an already extensive trading presence, a wealthy group of capitalists eager to invest in ventures that might secure them even greater riches, and a government that was sympathetic to the concerns of commerce. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the cities had a huge supply of labor; former tenant farmers and farmhands were scrambling for work up and down the unfamiliar streets of England's rapidly growing urban centers.
Inventions Spur Industrialization
In 1733 John Kay invented a mechanism known as a flying shuttle for use in weaving cloth. By the 1780s this device coincided with inventions by James Hargreaves, whose "spinning Jenny" increased the production of thread, and Richard Arkwright, developer of the water frame that harnessed a natural resource to power textile mills. Such inventions dramatically increased the speed with which cotton textile goods could be produced. As weaving machines grew more complex, however, they became too expensive for individuals or small, cottage-based industries to afford. Arkwright subsequently opened a large mill, the first example of what would become known as the factory system: a place where machines and workers were brought together in one central location. This was an important innovation, for prior to this time, most production operations were small, inefficient, home-based efforts. By the 1790s, according to Stearns, "cotton production . . . was advancing with extraordinary rapidity. New machines required a factory organization, for the power could not be transmitted widely. Workers had to be removed from their homes and clustered around the new machines. Cotton spinning was entirely concentrated in factories by the 1790s."
But while innovations in cotton production were central to the growth of industrialization in England (indeed, the Industrial Revolution did not spread from textiles to include other industries until well into the nineteenth century), countless inventions and discoveries in the late 1700s and 1800s spurred new heights of technological growth and scientific investigation around the world. Landmarks in transportation and power included James Watt's development of the steam engine (1769), one of the most important innovations in its ability to provide a portable energy source for plants, mines, and ironworks; George Stephenson's subsequent construction of the first reliable steam locomotive (1829); Michael Faraday's unveiling of the first electric motor and generator (1831); and Gottlieb Daimler's development of the internal combustion engine (1883). Daimler's subsequent development, with Karl Benz, of the first automobile, would eventually spark a revolution of its own: the transportation revolution of the twentieth century. Exciting new discoveries in the realm of communications were made as well, ranging from Samuel Morse's 1844 invention of the telegraph to the laying of the first transatlantic cable in 1850 to Guglielmo Marconi's invention of wirelesstelegraphy in 1894. A dizzying array of inventions were announced in other fields, too, including Aloys Senefelder's invention of lithography (1796), Allesandro Volta's invention of the first electric battery (1800), Humphrey Davy's invention of the electric (carbon arc) lamp (1808), Louis Daguerre's development of the first permanent photograph (1837), Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber (1839), and William Roentgen's work on x-rays (1895). The inventiveness of all these pioneers "cannot be attributed to any single factor," contends John B. Owen in The Eighteenth Century 1714-1815. "The challenge of increased demand, the availability of ample resources of men, money and materials, and the existence of specific problems of production all doubtless encouraged enterprise and innovation."
Riding the advances in steam power and iron and steel production, in particular, a wide range of British industries—from furniture making to lumbering to printing—became increasingly mechanized and factory-oriented by the 1830s. Innovations such as the telephone, developed by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and the electric light, one of over a thousand inventions of Thomas Edison, put an end to the natural limits imposed by workable daylight and distance. The country's factory-based economy, coupled with its effective harnessing of new power sources and transportation options, placed the nation far ahead of other industrializing nations for much of the nineteenth century.
British Dominance of the Industrial
Age
In the first half of the nineteenth century other nations began the process of industrialization, following the trail first blazed by England. Regions of Belgium and Germany nurtured industrial communities, and several large European cities became increasingly industrial in their orientation as well. Their progress was slowed, however, by English laws that prohibited the export of machines (and personnel). Military clashes across the rest of Europe also made it difficult for countries to initiate industrialization. In the resource-rich United States, however, Americans embraced the Industrial Revolution. Spurred by infusions of foreign capital, the country registered dramatic improvements in communications, manufacturing, and transportation. By 1870 only England led the United States in industrial production.
Great Britain's stature as the world's industrial leader remained secure throughout the nineteenth century, due in large part to the "spectacular growth of an integrated global economy that drew ever more regions into a transoceanic and transcontinental trading and financial network centered upon western Europe, and in particular upon Great Britain," according to Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. "These decades of British economic hegemony were accompanied by large-scale improvements in transport and communications, by the increasingly rapid transfer of industrial technology from one region to another, and by an immense spurt in manufacturing output, which in turn stimulated the opening of new areas of agricultural land and raw-materials sources."
Improvements in the realms of land and water transportation were central factors in the growth of all industrializing nations. Burgeoning railroad networks and water routes were essential in speeding delivery of raw materials and salable goods alike to their intended destinations. Key events in the creation of these rail and water networks, such as the 1825 opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, the 1859 construction of the SuezCanal, and the 1869 completion of America's transcontinental railroad, were thus rightfully hailed as milestones in modern history.
Transformation of Society and Culture
The industrialization of cities in England (and elsewhere in subsequent years) dramatically altered the tenor of urban life. Professional and management opportunities proliferated within their boundaries, and a sizable middle class developed. In Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution sparked increased prestige and economic power for the middle class, and political recognition of this new force in English society naturally followed. (Reform bills in 1832, 1867, and 1884 all liberalized representation and voting rights in England.) This phenomenon spread across all industrializing nations in the nineteenth century.
Industrialization also meant change for families, however, from those of poor laborers to those firmly entrenched in the middle class. With work removed from home settings to factory settings, women and children were forced to enter the work force in record numbers to meet the costs of urban life. This was especially true among the poorer members of the urban population; some middle-class families were able to get by on one salary, and the duties of women in such households invariably became domestic in their focus.
As families grappled with the new realities of urbanization and industrialization, Stearns notes that "two visions of the industrial family developed in western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century. Middle-class male commentators increasingly saw the family as an emotional haven, an essentially spiritual refuge deliberately separate from the new stresses of economic life." As this view of the home-as-sanctuary became entrenched in middle-class thought, families emerged as "centers of sedate leisure. . . . Along with the leisure function came a new interest in family-oriented consumption, for the focus on the home easily translated into desire for better and more comfortable furnishings and decorations. Thus emerged a growing market for a variety of manufactured products, such as wallpaper, furniture, and carpeting."
As the middle class grew wealthier and better educated, they became more vocal about the general quality of life in cities. "They came to demand not only a higher standard of cleanliness, with adequately paved, drained and lighted streets," explains Dorothy Marshall in English People in the Eighteenth Century, "but also such things as a convenient assembly hall, a subscription library, possibly a printing press with a local newspaper, certainly book shops, and often a Literary and Philosophical Society." The economic growth of the Industrial Revolution thus bred a demand for corresponding growth in society and culture.
Working Conditions in Factories and Mines
While the middle class clamored for streetlights and libraries, many members of the working class were preoccupied with survival. Eric Hobsbawm relates in Industry and Empire that after visiting Manchester, an industrial city in England, in 1835, French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville was moved to write that "from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage." Charles Dickens would echo these sentiments in novels like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, in an effort to alert the complacent middle and upper classes to the suffering of British workers.
Indeed, the cities spawned by the Industrial Revolution were stained with areas of terrible poverty and despair. Families were often forced to live together in dirty and cramped tenement houses that nonetheless were priced to take almost all of a family's wages. Filth and disease were constant presences.
Relief from such conditions was not to be found on the factory floor or in the mines. The lives of factory workers and miners, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution, were marked by hardship and danger. Laborers worked exhausting hours in often appalling conditions; death and mutilation were common sights on England's factory floors and in its mines. Economic circumstances also forced women and children of poor families to work in mines and factories whose owners paid them a pittance for backbreaking work. The use of child labor gradually aroused outrage, for the children "were sometimes treated as little more than slaves and kept on starvation diets at the mercy of overseers armed with whips and straps. . . . Worked 16 hours a day without breaks, they raided refuse dumps for food" (Everyday Life through the Ages). The Factory Act of 1833 was one of a series of legislative reforms aimed at curbing the abuse of children in the workplace, yet its very terms illustrated how bad the situation was: the act prohibited employment of children under nine years of age at cotton mills (children over the age of nine were limited to twelve hours a day). In the late 1820s another law was passed that prohibited mine owners from employing women and girls, as well as boys under the age of ten. Finally, in 1847, Parliament passed a law known as the Ten Hours Act, which made it illegal for factories to demand more than a ten-hour workday of women and children under the age of eighteen.
But while the governments of England, France, the United States, and other industrialized nations passed laws that addressed some workplace inequities in the nineteenth century, factories remained harsh working environments, and wage scales remained low. Workers subsequently pushed for fairer wages and better working conditions via work stoppages and strikes.
Strikes became commonplace in industrial countries in the nineteenth century, and workers began to form unified labor organizations. Such unions were illegal in many countries, but the workers persevered, and the legal status of such organizations gradually changed. In 1870, for instance, England legalized strikes, while France legalized trade unions in 1884. Corporations and governments came to recognize that the unions were a force that they could not simply ignore or obliterate, and a new relationship marked by bargaining and negotiation emerged between management and employee representatives.
Theories and Views of Industrialization
The Industrial Revolution was, as Paul Kennedy observes, "a fundamentally important transformation in man's economic circumstances." Economists, businessmen, politicians, writers, and other members of society naturally had differing feelings about the advantages and disadvantages of this new stage in human development, and a number of influential works supporting different economic and cultural theories were published. Perhaps the most important of the economically oriented works was Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), a book that championed free enterprise and the law of supply and demand. Other influential works included An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) by Thomas Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (1817) by David Ricardo, and On Liberty, an 1859 treatise by John Stuart Mill.
The late 1700s and early 1800s also saw the development of a number of important movements that sought to curb or eliminate the darker aspects of industrialization. In 1811 a group of people known as Luddites, concerned about the effect that machines were having on employment, initiated five years of rioting and destruction of textile machinery. Two decades later, a new reform movement known as Chartism emerged. Supporters of this philosophy pushed for a variety of measures aimed at improving the social and working conditions of the working class. Even members of the Romantic artistic community rebelled against the "ugliness of the industrial setting," explains Stearns. "Romantic painters early in the nineteenth century concentrated on idyllic scenes of nature in part to contrast with the blight of factory cities."
Other theories came into being as well. Some reformers adopted economist Jeremy Bentham's theory of utilitarianism (in which the merits of society's acts should be judged by their usefulness to the largest segment of the community), while others turned to various branches of Socialist thought including Marxist Socialism, a system of thought propagated by Karl Marx in his 1848 Communist Manifesto and subsequent writings. Marx's theories would eventually serve as the guiding principles of the Soviet Union and other nations in the twentieth century.
Gale Document Number: EJ2105230025